It’s really inconvenient to continually enter your password when ssh’ing among internal servers. Especially if your password is long.

I have set up password-less login on some of our linux servers using this excellent guide.

I had already set up a private/public key pair on my mac in the .ssh folder in my /Users/ folder:

.ssh/id_rsa
.ssh/id_rsa.pub

It’s necessary to send your public key to the server you intend to log into. The provided command does not work because the hidden directory does not exist yet:

a@A:~> cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh b@B 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

I had to go onto the remote server to create the directory .ssh/authorized_keys before the above command would work. It asks for my password one last time to append the contents of my public key into the authorized keys file.

Now when doing ssh SERVERIP I am logged straight in.